The Trolley Dodger

“Hardie Henderson: Champion Base Ball Pitcher” — pitched from 1883-1887 for the Philadelphia Quakers, Baltimore Orioles, Brooklyn Grays (19th-century precursor to the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers), and Pittsburgh Alleghenys.

In a horrible bit of irony, Henderson was killed in February 1903 when he was run over by a train trolley.[1]

Read more at:

• baseball-reference.com
• Wikipedia

[1] See this history of native Philadelphian ballplayers at Google Books.

Found browsing though my pictures directory recently — a great Ebbets Field shot with trolley in foreground. And there are even some Brooklynites dodging it! ;)

It is often said that the 162-game baseball season is a marathon. By most measures, it would appear that the formerly fleet-footed Dodgers have hit the proverbial runner’s Wall. After their 121st game last night, another loss in the recent 4-6 slide, the metaphorical glycogen has been depleted something fierce.

Being a baseball fan takes a certain amount of long-term commitment. For every marathoner running their 26 miles and 385 yards, there’s a crowd of people waiting around on the sidelines for at best two hours (if their favorite runner is from Kenya ;), but probably more like 4 or 5 hours.

That’s a long time to stand around watching people moaning in pain while they shuffle along the street, leaving behind a wide swath of sweat on the asphalt. The very first guy to run a marathon in 490 BC reportedly died. For the love of Mike your nipples bleed if you don’t take precautions against chafing! Gah!

A baseball game also involves hanging around for a few hours, either in uncomfortable seating at the park or on your couch at home, multiplied by however many games you pay attention to. With the average length of a game at 2:45, you could rack up over 445 hours if you watched every minute of every game. Not to mention achieving the gluteal equivalent of bed sores.

Another baseball axiom is that winning cures all ills. It’s so much easier to keep watching game after game if your team is winning most of them — the same thing is true, even more so, if you’re playing them. Lately, it’s been much harder to want to watch Dodger games. This past Monday’s debut of knuckleballer Charlie Haegar was the first time in a while that I was actually looking forward excitedly to see a Dodger game. Naturally, they lost.

So starting pitchers are dropping like flies, the Rockies and Giants are worryingly not going away, and I issue a plaintive sigh whenever somebody asks how the Dodgers are doing.

There is another baseball truism that applies however, even if the “it’s still early” denial won’t work anymore.

Don’t get too high or too low.

As easy as it would be to descend into the depths of depressive fatalism, the Dodgers are still in first place by a few games. They are not being blown out and are a few breaks one way or another to being undefeated in the last 10 games. While they are struggling against elite pitching, everybody struggles against elite pitching — that’s why they’re elite.

During the halcyon days of pre-Mannygate, not to mention during the suspension when the Dodgers seemingly couldn’t lose, I had to remind myself not too get too elated or too prideful. “It’s still early” swings both ways.

In the best of times, don’t get too high. And in the worst of times, don’t get too low.

It’ll work out somehow. I have faith in this crazily talented team that they will struggle their way out of the doldrums and get hot at exactly the right time — going into the playoffs.

And hey, at least our nipples aren’t bleeding!

The set of people who are both readers of this site and users of the Mac flash card program iFlash is probably quite small, but just in case I’ll let you know I uploaded a “Dodgers Retired Numbers” deck to their Deck Library if you’d like to memorize those.

Here’s the Dodgers Retired Numbers page on Dodgers.com as well.

(I discovered over the weekend that you can also sync up iFlash decks with an iPhone/iTouch app for on-the-go memorization, so that’s pretty handy. I grabbed a couple of GRE vocab study decks to keep up my vocabulary chops. :)

Maria Serrao, a fixture in LA sports reporting currently with COX/RPV-TV (and one of the folks featured in Bluetopia) put together a short feature on the three Italians at the top of the Dodgers organization — Tommy Lasorda, Joe Torre, and Ned Colletti. And The Dodgers Italian Connection just won an award.

[It] was my pleasure to sit down with these three men and talk about their Italian heritage. As a result the feature called the “Italian Story” won a National award this week, called The Telly.

Maria has also started up a sports blog recently called, appropriately, Maria Serrao’s Sports Blog.